Featured Tracks:

"Room 302" [ft. Tink]

Future Brown

"Talkin Bandz" [ft. Shawnna and DJ Victoriouz]

Future Brown

All right, enough with "forward-thinking" already. By now, it’s up there with "ethereal" as one of the most mercilessly abused descriptors in the music critic’s arsenal, and I’m still not exactly sure what it means. Sometimes it feels like nothing but buzz terminology for tastemaker companies like record label Fade to Mind, "post-Internet lifestyle magazine" DIS Magazine, or youth-centric streetwear label Hood by Air. It’s easy to see why we’re so drawn to the concept, though. In Internet media especially, our appetite for newness has grown almost unsustainable—fuck right now, what’s happening next? All this "forward thinking" has dropped us at a disorienting crossroads: We’ve got unprecedented access to previously unreachable parts of the world, a constantly refreshing news feed, we’ve got 27 tabs open, and oh god, we’re still so terribly bored.

In concept, Future Brown’s promise is both realistic and utopian: A multi-media reflection of club and street music from across the globe, lovingly curated, and an idealistic glimpse of what the Internet at its best can facilitate—a democracy where genre is revealed as a construct so the real fun can begin. The project is a natural extension of the work of its four members: producer and composer Fatima Al Qadiri, Lit City Trax founder J-Cush, and Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda of production/DJ duo Nguzunguzu. These guys are known for their omnivorous, boundary-refuting DJ sets and club nights as much as their official releases; Nguzunguzu’s Perfect Lullaby set a new standard for post-regional, no-rules DJ mixes in 2011. With their self-titled debut album, released via Warp, the ethos is the same but the budget is bigger: The quartet provides the beats for a rotating cast of featured guests who traffic in styles as seemingly disparate as bop, grime, dancehall, and drill. Theoretically, everyone is pushed out of their respective comfort zones, geography-defying parallels are drawn, underappreciated street artists get some well-deserved shine, and we all turn up in the process. Everyone wins!

Theoretically, that is. But if we are to invest so heavily in theory here, we should probably get our theories straight. As Future Brown’s members would describe it, this is very much a free-form, vibes-based passion project, steered by the unrestricted contributions of the featured collaborators as much as the producers’ whims. "It’s all on accident. The thing that unites Future Brown is that there’s very little agenda," said Al Qadiri in aT Magazine feature earlier this month.

But for a freewheeling happy accident, there’s a fair bit of vague art school conceptualism floating around the project. The video for "Vernáculo", featuring Maluca,premiered at Art Basel last year as "an exercise in capitalist surrealism" (a descriptor that could easily apply to Art Basel itself). There’s the glossy and hi-def basketball imagery, the sort of winking, hyper-mundane meta-commercial iconography we’ve come to expect from DIS Magazine, who designed the album art. These slapped-on layers of meaning only distract from what this project could be at its best: surprising, accessible, genuinely utopian.

If the project’s sense of purpose seems a bit scattershot on paper—it’s about everything and nothing, partying and post-postmodernism, global street music and the New York art world, commodity fetishism and basketball—that ambiguity is even more apparent in sound. As thrilling as this tracklist appears at a glance—UK grime originators butting up against Chicago drill newcomers! Generations of feminist rap underbosses aligning!—the resulting tracks are weirdly unremarkable. The album has its moments: on "Big Homie", icy steel drums draw Sicko Mobb’s Lil Trav and Lil Ceno out of their usual Rainbow Road soundscapes into somewhere colder and more cavernous.

But for a project lauded as progressive, I’m not so sure what’s being pushed forward here. We’ve heard sounds like these, and better, on Future Brown’s solo members’ side projects. We’ve seen these visual aesthetics (frankly, they peaked in 2012 on Jam City’sClassical Curves album art). And most regrettably, the featured artists’ guest spots rarely do justice to what makes them special in their own right. Even Tink, the irrepressible, multi-talented Chicagoan who Timbaland’s called the next Aaliyah, sounds just okay on her two showcases here. "Room 302" and "Wanna Party" are decent songs, but instead of a mutually stimulating partnership, they kinda sound like Tink verses plopped over grime beats.

Club music doesn’t need to come with a thesis to be worthy of further investigation—if anything, a thesis is an impediment. But if you’re going to start a conversation, you should be prepared to finish it, and Future Brown feels overwhelmingly like a bunch of intriguing ideas left to drift off inconclusively. It’s an album of aesthetics and not many ideas, and that’s just fine. But it’s okay to let a basketball be a basketball, and not an orb imbued with the power of community, or something. It would seem that Future Brown has been so focused on forward motion that they’ve gotten ahead of themselves. The thrill of discovery from unexpected juxtapositions, the kind that makes you feel like the world is a more intimate, interconnected place, that happens organically in the Future Brown members’ DJ sets, doesn’t feel as thrilling as promised.